I have always believed in cooking food from scratch. It’s primarily because I just love cooking and baking in general, so the time invested in it doesn’t seem like a waste as it does to so many, but it also makes sense from a health and awareness standpoint. When you make your food, you know exactly what goes into it, and there are no surprises. There’s no hidden high fructose corn syrup, no monosodium glutamate, no disgusting artificial colorings and preservatives that have complicated and scary sounding names. You can control the amount of salt or sugar or oil or any ingredient you use.

But then I think of all the things I have absolutely zero desire to make, primarily because I’ve made them in cooking classes in the past and realized that they are hard AF to make (e.g. croissants, macarons), or because I know they are hard and laborious, and I simply have no desire to make them (Peking duck, parathas). And then, on my last trip to Jackson Heights to stock up on Middle Eastern and Indian ingredients, I found a VALUE PACK for 25 paratha in the freezer section, which I rarely look at unless I’m getting frozen vegetables as backup. 25 PARATHA FOR SEVEN DOLLARS? And all made of natural ingredients with zero preservatives? And all I have to do is heat them up in an empty skillet? Yesssssssssss.

These are the joys of the modern (and increasingly obese and unhealthy) world, of the lazy person who likes food and doesn’t want to cook it. I can kind of relate now.

In getting ramped up for job training, I’ve been encouraged to look at different people’s calendars in the company and add myself to meetings I think would be beneficial, so everything from customer calls, internal product calls, engagement calls — you name it. I’ve been told to shadow as much as possible and refer to everyone’s calendars. One of our main company values is transparency. All our calendars are visible to all so that our colleagues can know what we’re doing and who we’re speaking with and what we’re working on. That all sounds like common sense, right?

Well, it isn’t really. Because where I came from, we had different people on sales and someone who was once on my own team who refused to make their calendars transparent. So if you looked at this guy’s calendar, instead of telling you what his meeting was and who he was speaking with, it would simply block out a time and say “busy.” If you’re working at an organization where people are supportive of one another and share information to help one another, why the hell would you make your entire calendar blocked from others to see? His response when we actually debated this? “I don’t want you to see when I’m at the doctor’s or getting my teeth cleaned!” That argument is so weak because you can just mark those specifically as “private.” Your work calendar is your work calendar, not your personal calendar. Your work calendar should be visible in a healthy organization. No one is asking you to make your private non-work life visible. At the “top” of that team I started on at my last company was someone who didn’t want to instill any values about transparency or trust in his team, so he stayed out of this conversation and said everyone could make their own decisions about this. It probably wasn’t apparent to him because he was dense and self-seeking, but something as seemingly trivial as this actually speaks volumes regarding the organization he is trying to lead and the culture he wants to instill. Until the last day, there was no real sense of “team” on that team. It was really sad.

My new company is by no means perfect, and every day I’m seeing things that could use improvement, but I never entered this place thinking it would be paradise. But to be frank, it actually does feel like a sort of paradise when you compare it to the last place where I spent 3.5 years. It still kills me when I think about it that I stayed there that long.

During his test comedy show at a small, intimate venue last night, Hasan Minhaj talked about an experience on a plane where a guy who sat next to him was carrying a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 — you know, that one single phone that has been exploding and catching fire that has been banned from planes? Hasan immediately is alarmed and tells the guy that he cannot have that phone on the plane, that it’s dangerous and could explode. The guy gets really defensive and is really annoyed. He responds with questions like, just because other Galaxy Note 7s have exploded doesn’t mean his will. There are plenty of Galaxy Note 7s that have not exploded, so why are the few that have exploded giving the rest of these phones such a bad rap? You can’t just assume that my Galaxy Note 7 will be bad, too! Mine is fine!

Hasan Minhaj’s response? “Well now, my friend, you understand what it’s like to be a minority.”

Tonight, I went to see a test comedy performance by Hasan Minhaj, who I love and have seen live before in his one-man show Homecoming King, and of course, have also seen in The Daily Show. Chris couldn’t make it as he had a work trip that conflicted, and my friend who was supposed to come with me bailed on me right before the show because he was too tired to stay late enough. So it was just me sitting on my own amongst strangers.

It was actually really nice to be there on my own because I ended up having a decent conversation with an Indian-American guy who had traveled from LA for work. He works for Adult Swim, a film company, and was here this week for work. As someone who works in film and writes, he’s a huge fan of Hasan Minhaj and was on a mailing list that alerted him to this show. He looks at people like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Russell Peters as inspirations. As the son of very traditional Indian parents, with his dad working and moving their family all over the country with his career in IT, he’s very well aware of how Asians are stereotyped and hopes to follow in these writer/comedians’ footsteps.

I’m excited to see a more colorful representation of talent now and in the future since it clearly was not something I grew up with. This guy at just 24 gives me hope, just like Hasan Minhaj and Ronny Chieng do.